WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR GREATER YELLOWSTONE IF BOZEMAN BECOMES MINNEAPOLIS-SIZED AND JACKSON HOLE BECOMES AN ANCHOR FOR SALT LAKE CITY-LIKE SPRAWL?

Does the “M” on the Bridgers stand for Minneapolis? When projected out at a three percent growth rate, Bozeman/Gallatin Valley will reach the present-day population of Minneapolis in half a century. In fact, Bozeman/Gallatin is growing at four percent, meaning it will be Salt Lake City-sized in 18 years and Minneapolis sized in 36 years. Composite photo of Minneapolis skyline and Bozeman created by MoJo staff

“The problem is that the Lords of Yesteryear never disappeared as we were promised and the challenges of the New West are far worse than we were promised. I don’t want a West of man-camps and gas field booms, nor a West of precious tourist towns that exist to feed a global cowboy/mountain man/Disney/ski resort/New Age fantasy, surrounding by busted towns that are ghettos for workers.” —Luther Propst

In the stillness of a summer morning, haze from wildfire smoke thickening the air, Randy Carpenter arrives for a hike up Sypes Canyon in the pastoral northern outskirts of Bozeman, Montana. Ascending into the Bridger Mountain foothills, we talk about how “crazy” it feels these days “in town”, how quickly new subdivisions are springing up in fields that a year ago were covered with wheat.

And then Carpenter starts in, reciting some jaw-dropping statistics that seem abstract until we reach an overlook and gaze clear-eyed into an uncertain future.

Before us, and stretching for nearly 40 miles to the next muted horizon is the Gallatin Valley, one of the fastest-growing semi-rural settings in America. Carpenter, known for his work as a career land use planner, says it won’t be long, given current trend-lines, before the vast chasm of space fills in with exurban development.

Yes, it’s a fact in the Anthropocene: places grow and inevitably change. I’ve been fortunate to view some of the more spectacular undiscovered ones firsthand in my reporting around the world, but what Carpenter says has radically altered the way I think about the place I call home—the place that I assumed given the huge base of public lands would always be protected.

It’s made me realize no other models from elsewhere can be imported to resolve what’s currently happening rapidly in Greater Yellowstone, the wildest corner of the Lower 48 states.

The Gallatin Valley is rapidly filling in, with scattershot sprawl sweeping across rural areas of the county. “Before a baby born this year graduates from the new high school in Bozeman, she will watch the valley where she’s growing up add the equivalent of a Boulder, Colorado to the landscape,” Randy Carpenter says. Photo courtesy EcoFlight (ecoflight.org)

Rather, the paradoxical challenge, Carpenter says, is that Greater Yellowstone’s own salvation depends upon it becoming the example other regions with wildlands in their backyards emulate. But it means achieving something that’s seldom been accomplished in the modern world—defying human nature.

Bozeman/Gallatin County presently is inhabited by around 105,000 human denizens. One of every ten Montanans dwells here. But within 24 years, given a three percent growth rate, the number will double.

It means that Bozeman/Gallatin, by 2041, will equal the size of Salt Lake City proper (minus its suburbs). Even more sobering, in less than half a century, 2065, based on the same rate of annual growth, there will be a population of 420,000 (equal to all the residents of the entire Greater Yellowstone today).

That’s a concentration of people, to put it in perspective, Minneapolis-sized, consuming much of the open space between the Bridgers and the distant ranch/farmlands around Three Forks, the town so named because it’s where the Gallatin, Madison and Jefferson rivers converge to form the birthplace of the Missouri.

Many Bozemanians, Carpenter admits, probably find the prospect of us becoming Salt Lake and then Minneapolis inconceivable, especially those boosters of growth who have steadfastly fought progressive planning and zoning, impact fees, placing conservation initiatives on the ballot for voters to decide and anything else they find to be restrictive of individual liberty.

Point of fact and this is the shocking part, Gallatin County is actuallygrowing at better than a four percent rate—not three. (Recently, I spoke with a local public health official who serves on a committee addressing the shortage of doctors in southwest Montana and the demographic data they are using suggests the growth rate for Bozeman/Gallatin is actually eight percent, meaning the scenario above could happen twice as fast).

Carpenter uses three percent to be conservative—indisputable and very conservative, it turns out, given still other wildcard factors that could make the growth projections seem quaint. He makes his calculation using the “rule of 72” in which the constant growth rate is divided into 72 and it provides the number of years it takes a locale to double in population. (Ironically, the same formula can be used for calculated return on investment). A three percent annual growth rate means Bozeman/Gallatin will double in 24 years. A four-percent rate, meanwhile, means it would only take 18 years to reach Salt Lake City and 36 years (or the year 2053) to match the population of present-day Minneapolis proper.

Growth, some opine, is always good, that it’s better to be booming in the West instead of busting. But the questions are: good for whom, good for what, and how are growth’s real impacts and hidden costs really being manifested? Most importantly, who is paying for them?

Bozeman, as the largest community in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, could be regarded as its capital city yet it does not exist in isolation; its trends have huge implications for every corner of the region.

Bozeman/Gallatin, by 2041, will equal the size of Salt Lake City proper (minus its suburbs). Even more sobering, in less than half a century, 2065, based on the same rate of annual growth, there will be a population of 420,000 here, equal to present-day Minneapolis proper. And Carpenter says that could actually be a conservative estimate, with this scenario arriving faster than people think.

While the effects of climate change are considered so amorphous, that, for now, they’re difficult to wrap one’s mind around, projections for growth, based on extrapolations of hard existing data, are impossible to dismiss.

There is today a palpable sense of social unrest welling up in Bozeman related to the multiplying impacts of growth. It is accompanied by a widespread perception that developers, especially speculators who made fortunes in real estate development in states like California, Utah and Colorado, have moved in for the kill, taking advantage of naive, provincial-minded planning staffs that are increasingly overwhelmed and codes that are lax compared to where the developers came from.

There’s no denying the physical manifestations transforming a landscape like the Gallatin Valley that, since in the 1860s, has held some of the richest farmland in the state while providing key wildlife habitat for species synonymous with the ecosystem.

“The impacts of growth are not only accelerating. The effects are compounding,” Carpenter says. “This isn’t just another boom that will eventually be mitigated by another bust.”

The eruption of development is unprecedented, permanent and the impacts irreversible, he notes. Unless leaders in the region, from public land managers to city and county elected officials, become consciously aware of what’s happening and try to get ahead of it, the consequences will be severe, ecologically and economically, he says.

Planner and growth expert Randy Carpenter of FutureWest standing on public lands in the Bridger Mountains with Bozeman and the Gallatin Valley unfolding to his back. Todd Wilkinson photo.

Carpenter, who works for the non-profit think-tank FutureWest, which advises rural communities on how to remain vibrant while preserving their character and sense of place, is not known for speaking in platitudes.

If and when the anticipated future lying before us arrives, scientists and planners like Carpenter, who have witnessed the results of runaway growth elsewhere, say a vital part of Greater Yellowstone, the most heralded complex of still-wild terrain in the West will be lost.

“In the middle of a boom, we rarely hear about downsides,” Carpenter, a native of Iowa, says. “The boosters don’t want to hear it. They choose to live in denial and their attitude works as long as it’s not challenged. I’ve seen a lot of farms and wildlife habitat disappear but I’ve never seen a subdivision vanish. Concrete, asphalt, roads, traffic, noise pollution—they are forever. What we forget is that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem isn’t just uncommon. It is an American treasure and the only one of its kind in the world.”

Whether one is Republican or Democrat, a political conservative or liberal, Carpenter reckons that few enjoy paying higher taxes. One prominent expert on land use planning has described growth as essentially a Ponzi scheme by which the economic costs associated with frenzied growth in the present are paid for by receipts generated from growth in the future. The implication is that citizens unknowingly subsidize the very kind of costly growth and profits for special interests they don’t want to pay for.

What’s at stake? In a word, wildness; more specifically, a rare quality of wildness capable of sustaining the survival of an unsurpassed assemblage of free-ranging wild creatures. This—wildlife— is the superlative that sets Greater Yellowstone apart from any other region in the Lower 48. It has every major species that was here before Europeans arrived on the continent, most notably grizzly bears and wolves, bison, elk, pronghorn, deer herds, moose and a huge diversity of bird and other mammals, including wolverines, black-footed ferrets Canada lynx, trumpeter swans and sage grouse.

What makes Greater Yellowstone eminently distinct is that the large ungulate herds still move across the landscape along ancient migration pathways between seasonal summer habitats in the mountains, where mothers give birth to their young, and winter ranges. The routes used by elk, mule deer and pronghorn are among the longest in North America. Such migrations have vanished everywhere else due to habitat fragmentation caused by human activities. Why do conservation biologists liken Greater Yellowstone to the wildebeest migration across Africa’s Serengeti Plain? This is why. See map below.

This map created by the Wyoming Migration Initiative identified the long-distance elk migrations that spiral in and out of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. It’s one of the things that make the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem extraordinary in the world.. Map courtesy Wyoming Migration Initiative (http://migrationinitiative.org)

What has spared Greater Yellowstone is its relative geographic isolation, the fact that it does not have a major urban area like Salt Lake City, Denver, or Boise parked on its doorstep. Indeed, the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies and the Wasatch Front are perhaps the poster children of how true wildness in the West has eroded and suffers in the age of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene being a term describing the era in which human presence wields such influence that it not only causes climate change and species extinctions but fundamentally alters the function of nature itself.

Bozeman is positioned on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s northern flank but by dint of setting it is also a wildlife crossroads between wildlands to the south and north, east and west. (Mountain Journal will explore the vital importance of having functioning biological corridors between other ecosystems in future stories).

The 20 contiguous counties comprising Greater Yellowstone are, put together, the fastest growing rural region in the country. It’s vital to note the caveat that not all of Greater Yellowstone’s counties have significantly growing populations, but the ones that do have created a spillover effect that impacts their slower-growing brethren.

The growth in Bozeman/Gallatin is actually a harbinger, experts say. Parallel growth scenarios are playing out around the region—astride the Tetons in adjoining Teton County, Wyoming and Teton County, Idaho; the booming state highway 20 corridor between Idaho Falls, Rexburg and Island Park, Idaho; the southern tier of Jackson Hole stretching toward Hoback Junction and Star Valley; a triangle of topography formed by Cody, Wyoming, Red Lodge, Montana and Billings. More people also are pouring into Paradise Valley between Livingston along the Yellowstone River and Gardiner, that is itself the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park.

How will the wild character of Greater Yellowstone be changed when Bozeman/Gallatin Valley hold as many people as present-day Minneapolis? What happens to the Teton region when the corridor between Idaho Falls-Rexburg and Teton Valley-Jackson Hole is covered in Salt Lake City-style sprawl?

Conservatively, if the growth rate of the past 30 years continues, the overall population of the Greater Yellowstone region is expected to surge, in just 13 years’ time, from the current 450,000 denizens, to 677,000. That translates on the ground, he says, to another100,000 homes. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t grow faster than that,” Carpenter says. (The population of the entire state of Wyoming is 585,000; Montana a little over 1 million; and Idaho1.7 million)

The average number of people per dwelling in Greater Yellowstone homes is about 2.3, half the number of two generations ago. Yet even with fewer inhabitants, homes are being built with more square footage; many are going up in the forested wildland-urban interface where they are more likely to burn in a wildfire and residents expect to receive expensive taxpayer-subsidized firefighting services. Others, craving views, will unknowingly and with no context provided by realtors, site their dream casas in important wildlife winter range or near riparian areas (river corridors) considered biodiversity hotspots.

The space claimed by those homes in exurbia is not merely the envelope of the structure itself but it includes access roads and driveways, outbuildings, gardens and lawns fenced to keep wildlife out, barking dogs, housecats preying on songbirds, mini horse pastures and ground disturbance to accommodate essential services such as electricity, plumbing and septic.

Conservatively, if the growth rate of the past 30 years continues, the overall population of the Greater Yellowstone region is expected to surge, in just 13 years’ time, from the current 450,000 denizens, to 677,000. That translates on the ground to another100,000 homes.

Once infrastructure is bulldozed in for one subdivision, it fuels more adjacent access roads, and thus more infrastructure, accelerating the pace of exurban development and results in rising costs for counties, e.g. taxpayers, to provide public services. “Bozeman/Gallatin isn’t considered a metro area yet but by the middle of the next decade it will be and if we know anything about development trends nationwide, areas located at the edge of metro areas are growing fastest,” Carpenter says. “Before a baby born this year graduates from the new high school in Bozeman, she will watch the valley where she’s growing up add the equivalent of a Boulder, Colorado to the landscape.”

The current 450,000 population figure for Greater Yellowstone’s population does not include the 160,000 people currently living in nearby Billings/Yellowstone County located just 20 miles beyond the official northeast edge of the ecosystem. This is important because with Gallatin and Yellowstone counties bookending 140 miles of U.S. Interstate 90 between them, in-fill of development on the landscape is expected to be rapid and some have speculated that by the middle of this century there could be between 800,000 and 1 million people living between Three Forks and Billings..

The growth in Bozeman/Gallatin is actually a harbinger of parallel growth scenarios playing out around the region—astride the Tetons in adjoining Teton County, Wyoming and Teton County, Idaho; the booming state highway 20 corridor between Idaho Falls, Rexburg and Island Park, Idaho; the southern tier of Jackson Hole stretching toward Hoback Junction and Star Valley; a triangle of topography formed by Cody, Wyoming, Red Lodge, Montana and Billings. More people also are pouring into Paradise Valley between Livingston along the Yellowstone River and Gardiner, that is itself the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park.

Beyond Bozeman’s coming sprawl, there is another stunning reality. Within a decade or two, the population in the resort community of Big Sky could be approaching the size of Jackson Hole’s and will result in a complete biological east-west decapitation of the north-south running Madison Mountain Range. The Madisons have been an important passageway for wildlife. Big Sky, already bursting at the seams along the Gallatin River will be spilling westward out across the forested mountains into the Madison Valley. The enclave of Ennis will at least double. All of these figures do not include the large and increasing number of second home owners who do not claim Greater Yellowstone as their primary residence with the U.S. Census Bureau.

Within a few decades, the connect-the-dots corridor of Idaho Falls/Bonneville County, Idaho (currently 110K people) -Rexburg/Madison County, Idaho (40K)-Driggs/Victor/Teton County, Idaho (10K)-Jackson Hole/Teton County, Wyoming (24K)-Afton/Star Valley/Lincoln County, Wyoming (20K)-Pinedale/Sublette County, Wyoming (10K) will hold its own greater Salt Lake City equivalent of sprawl. Cody/Park County will hold a Bozeman-sized population. The Upper Yellowstone River Valley, between Gardiner and Livingston, will also be approaching Bozeman of today. Further, Billings/Laurel will be spilling into Red Lodge.

What is happening in Gallatin County, as just one example, does indeed have huge spill-over effect implications for the Madison and Paradise valleys, and the open space defining Bridger Canyon and even the Shields Valley along the western face of the Crazy Mountains. Several ecologists told me that even if public land remains unchanged and not significantly impaired—an impossibility with climate change and energy development—the effects of private land development will doom the major wildlife migration corridors.

While Greater Yellowstone is still ecologically intact, the way humans relate to it is multi-dimensionally fragmented. Again, among wildlife professionals there is widespread agreement that unless leaders (including public land managers, county commissioners, state legislators and mayors) think big and cohesively, making conscious effort to avert destructive patterns of sprawl that have degraded natural environments elsewhere, Greater Yellowstone is destined to follow the same fate.

On top of the inward population migration of permanent and part-time residents, the front-country areas of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, already choked with summer traffic, have broken visitation records almost every year for the last decade. Escalating recreation pressure is happening too. Mountain biking and ATV users on national forests and BLM lands accounts for some of the largest growth in backcountry users and they are reaching remote places considered important and safe refugia for wildlife.

The majority of Greater Yellowstone’s public landscape is administered by the U.S. Forest Service which oversees five different national forests that report to three different regions. There is presently no cohesive framework within the Forest Service for assessing what the rapidly cumulative impacts of expanding recreation are on wildlife or what they’ll be in the future. The Forest Service claims it is both too understaffed and underfunded. to generate the data it needs to make truly informed decisions.

Correspondingly, a complaint being more frequently leveled against some regional and national environmental groups in Greater Yellowstone is that those organizations are happy to fundraise by highlighting the threats of resource extraction activities such as mining and energy development. But, critics of those groups say, they are unwilling to call out the impacts of recreation or scrutinize private land development for fear of alienating donors or losing popularity in the communities where they work. Is that true? Mountain Journal will examine it in future stories.

As damaging as intensive energy development is to habitat for sensitive species on public lands such as sage grouse, and as disruptive as it is to migrating wildlife such as pronghorn and mule deer, eventually it goes away, allowing rehab specialists to try to restore the land’s ecological function. But the impacts that private land subdivisions have on wildlife are forever and they can negatively affect the health of species living on public land.. Photo of the Pinedale Anticline/Jonah Field complex courtesy EcoFlight (ecoflight.org)

Another major problem is that local and regional media has largely been missing in action in writing about growth. To date, there has not been a single journalist or publication devoted to covering the big-picture issues of the entire Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem full time. Truth be told, the stories that have been written about growth in the region have been lacking in depth and analysis.

How can the public engage in informed discussion about what’s at stake if the media—which reaches the greatest number of people—examines growth myopically? In cases where the media has covered stories, the reporting has been misleading or notable for the questions that aren’t being asked.

Gallatin County, Kendall wrote, is expected to hit 145,000 residents by 2060. But Prospera’s projections and Kendall’s reporting, were off. Way way off, in fact, by several times what the actual growth rate is. The data used by Prospera and the state calculated growth in Gallatin Valley at .8 percent when, again, it is closer to 4 percent in Bozeman/Gallatin.

“I found their publishing of this data to be bizarre,” Carpenter said. The problem with the Prospera report, besides the faulty algorithms used to calculate the growth rate, is that elected officials have pointed to it in their assertions that growth isn’t an issue. In fact, some vocal individuals claim that protecting public lands and planning and zoning on private land that safeguards open space and the environment are impediments to job creation.

“The big issue is just the level of disturbance being caused by constant, rising levels of human activity and it gets complicated for wildlife pretty fast. By the time you recognize a problem, it can be too late.” —Brent Brock

Together, the two national parks at the heart of Greater Yellowstone—Yellowstone and Grand Teton—infuse $1 billion in annual commerce driven by nature tourism to the region, with the marquee attractions being grizzlies, wolves and big game animals. The prospect of seeing wildlife attracts people from around the world. Bozeman has become the state’s busiest commercial airport, as has Jackson Hole’s in Wyoming.

Nature tourism has yielded sustainable commerce more reliable than the proceeds in recent years generated by the other pillars—agriculture, logging, hard-rock mining and coal (subject variously to the whims to weather and markets).

The magnetic appeal of wildness in Greater Yellowstone’s 22.5 million acres of land, an area equal to the size of South Carolina, and the preponderance of it taking the form of federal public lands, has a net annual economic value of more than $4 billion, suggests Headwaters Economics founder Ray Rasker.

Even U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, when he operated RightNow Technology (since acquired by Oracle), told me in a story I wrote for The Christian Science Monitorthat Bozeman/Gallatin’s clean and healthy environment was a major enticement for luring top-flight computer programmers to work for his company here.

But should Bozeman or even the governor of Montana be trying to aggressively recruit Silicon Valley firms to move their operations? What would be both the upshot and the downside to landscape and the livability of the Gallatin Valley if, say, 1,000 new, high-paying tech jobs were suddenly created?

No one, of course, is suggesting that good-paying jobs aren’t good, but most of those jobs would likely go to outsiders and families relocating here, further taxing schools, roads, eating up more land. Were the prospect presented, would it be wise for city/county/state leaders to encourage it to happen, essentially pressing the accelerator on a speed of growth that is already explosive but being met with no coherent plan to deal with it?

In a recent study with several authors, Andy Hansen, a conservation biologist and director of the Landscape Biodiversity Lab at Montana State University in Bozeman, noted that the number of private land tracts with no homes or few homes in Greater Yellowstone is declining. Meanwhile, the number of parcels with one home per 40 acres increased 328 percent from 1970 to 2010.

In 2013, 30 percent of Greater Yellowstone was considered “developed,” and some wildlife migration pathways were believed to be imperiled. By 2020, between 5 and 40 percent of the ecosystem’s most biologically rich habitats will undergo conversion from ranch and farmland to exurban development, he told me in a story I wrote for National Geographic.

Biologist Brent Brock, who operates a consulting business, HoloScene Wildlife Services, in Bozeman, thinks about the implications of human population pressure already being exerted on wildlife that inhabits both the front and backcountry. “The big issue is just the level of disturbance being caused by constant, rising levels of human activity and it gets complicated for wildlife pretty fast. By the time you recognize a problem, it can be too late,” Brock says. “For the longtime survival of species at a population level, such as wolverines and grizzlies, maintaining connectivity between wild lands inside Greater Yellowstone and beyond is essential and it necessarily includes wildlife being able to get safely through gauntlets of development in river valleys and across highways.”

The renowned guru of conservation biology, Reed Noss, has said nothing impacts the fabric of wildness more than roads or even recreation trails carrying heavy volumes of people. Based on his own research, Brock concurs.

“The effects are insidious because impacts might seem minor in the beginning but they can escalate,” he says. “Traffic volumes can cause animals to avoid moving through areas and they increase the probability of conflict. With development occurring in wildlife habitat or recreationists flooding into an area it’s the same thing. Either you are taking habitat directly away from wildlife or indirectly because the infrastructure brings in more people and it diminishes the carrying capacity and creates population sinks. People might see wildlife around for a while but offspring aren’t surviving so eventually the animals just disappear. The wildlife that do adapt become ‘mid-wild’ or habituated or it might mean, given the level of disturbance, that elk don’t migrate anymore.”

For those Greater Yellowstone residents who are indifferent to such impacts, unbridled growth has consequences for the very quality of life people are fleeing other areas to come here.

As Carpenter and I stand on the flanks of Sypes Canyon peering into the wood smoke from forest fires, he mentions that as Bozeman/Gallatin fledge into a full-fledged metro area, the beloved views of the Bridgers could, within a decade or two, become shrouded by smog that rivals Salt Lake City, seriously impairing air quality (and not including bad air made worse by forest fires).

That’s not good news for asthmatics but the most precious natural resource in Greater Yellowstone is water. A few years ago, a working group examined water use in Bozeman and arrived at this conclusion: By the year 2036 or when Bozeman reaches a population of 62,000—whichever comes first—the population of the city will outstrip the capacity of its existing water supply that takes the form of three reservoirs.

Bozeman’s population already is sailing through 50,000 and could reach the 62,000 threshold early in the 2020s, a full decade ahead of that prediction. Then what? “The water needs of the next fifty thousand people cannot be accommodated with the practices that supplied the first forty-five thousand,” said Bozeman city employee Lain Leoniak in a piece she wrote for the city’s website.

Carpenter says water could become a limiting factor that cools Bozeman/Gallatin’s growth.

For those who say the answer is simply to build more reservoir capacity by damming more mountain streams, climatologists note that the outlook for climate change effects are for hotter and drier summers and earlier or less winter snowpack. (In future stories, coming soon, I will address the consequences of that and resorting to groundwater pumping).

But this, too, raises another tantalizing question: If Bozeman, which sits near the headwaters of a major river system, is looking at water challenges, what is going to happen in major urban areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver and Tucson? Will water shortages and nearly unlivably hot temperatures there result in an exodus of people?

Bozeman City Commissioner Chris Mehl, who is running for mayor in the fall, works as an analyst at Headwaters Economics and previously served as a Congressional aide.. He is frustrated by the knee-jerk anti-government sentiment that proliferates in the rural West—based on the trope that “big government” is trying to rob individuals of their freedoms.

But should the costs of an individual’s right to do business on private land be passed along to taxpayers and do individuals who are transforming landscapes have any responsibility to help protect assets valuable to the common good, such as wildlife? It is clear that the free-market and laissez-fair capitalism has never resulted in a wild ecosystem like Greater Yellowstone staying protected.

In fact, there’s compelling fiscally-conservative argument that can be made for planning and zoning because it highlights predictable impacts and allows for crises to better be averted, like those that arise when towns run out of water, or a subdivision in the county discovers that its individual wells are contaminated by someone’s raw sewage due to septic systems put in on the sly and the cheap.

Mehl believes the only way that wildlife issues will resonate is if the threats are made tangible, not only in the eyes of citizens but the decision makers they elect. The media plays a crucial role. Paradoxically, at a moment in time when Greater Yellowstone most needs her residents to rally around a common vision, ideological divisions are at their deepest.

“To think more broadly and longer term cuts against the grain of human nature in some people,” Mehl said. “Frankly, I’m seeing a decline in the willingness of people to think long-term. It’s hard to get them out of their narrow mindset when they are scrambling to pay the bills.”

Click to enlarge photo: While the viewsheds on the east side of the Tetons are protected by the presence of Grand Teton National Park, the west side of the iconic mountains is experiencing a huge spillover effect from Jackson Hole. Teton Valley, Idaho also is facing growth pressures emanating from Idaho Falls and Rexburg. Composite photo of Teton Valley, Idaho facing the Tetons created by MoJo staff

If Bozeman/Gallatin is one of the main pistons in Greater Yellowstone, then Jackson Hole/Teton County, Wyoming is the other. Teton County is, per capita, one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S. because of the high concentration of uber-wealthy individuals who live there permanently and seasonally. For years, severe housing shortages have resulted in high home prices and rents so expensive school teachers and firefighters can’t afford to live there.

Part of the blame is because 97 percent of Teton County is federal or state land and just three percent is privately owned. Growth proponents have suggested that public land be divested to accommodate more development. But the truth is that the highway system in Teton County is already racked by urban-like congestion.

Today, more hotel rooms in Jackson Hole are being added to bring in more visitors who are shelling out hundreds of dollars a night while the service workers making the visitors’ beds have to make long commutes in and out of the valley. At the same time, multi-million-dollar, 10,000-square-foot homes are being built not only in Jackson Hole (but also, up north in Big Sky, Montana) exacting huge footprints and many are only inhabited for the equivalent of a few months out of every year. Meantime, development continues to fracture what remains of wildlife habitat with one indicator of the effects being a significant number of road-killed animals along the highways.

Packing more people into Teton County, critics of growth say, is not going to resolve any problems related to the impacts of sprawl and will only exacerbate the domino effects radiating in all directions.

“For better or for worse, Jackson Hole is the economic engine for Teton Valley, Idaho,” says Shawn Hill, executive director of Driggs, Idaho-based Valley Advocates for Responsible Development. His valley is located westward just over Teton Pass from Jackson Hole. “When Jackson overheats, we’re the release valve – especially when it comes to housing. However, over half of the housing units in Teton Valley now sell to second homeowners or investors, which soaks up much of the already limited housing inventory here.”

FutureWest, Teton Valley Advocates for Responsible Development and the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance are three of the very few conservation organizations in Greater Yellowstone aggressively working on private land growth issues.

A number of excellent land trusts are protecting land by brokering conservation easements in Greater Yellowstone, and an effort called the High Divide Collaborative is collaborating with ranchers and farmers to protect agrarian land, but none really engages in the contentious trenches of shaping public policy. Moreover, the pace of development is far outstripping the scope of protection being achieved by land trusts alone.

The High Divide, so named because it applies geographically to the path of the Continental Divide as it runs from Wyoming into Idaho and Montana, represents the western flank of Greater Yellowstone.

It’s a microcosm of the big picture. In the past 50 years, according to Headwaters Economics, 51 percent of new homes were built outside of town centers in unincorporated portions of High Divide counties. Since 2010, this trend has increased and 63 percent of new homes were built outside of towns.

“This trend of an increasing amount of development occurring outside of town centers will impact and compromise the future of important working lands, scenery, and wildlife habitat for many of the iconic wildlife species associated with the High Divide, including elk, pronghorn antelope, grizzly bears, and wolverine,” Headwaters stated in a report.

Dispersed homes also restrict hunting opportunities, limit scenic vistas and open spaces, and increase potential conflicts with agricultural land owners.

Among High Divide counties, high degree of variability exists in the amount of out-of-town growth. For example, in Jefferson and Madison Counties in Idaho, 19 percent of homes built since 2000 were built out-of-town. By contrast, in Madison County, Montana, one of the agrarian jewels of Greater Yellowstone, 91 percent of new homes put up since 2000 were built out-of-town.

In the past 50 years, the number of new homes in the High Divide built in the Wildland-Urban Interface, prone to burning by wildfires, has increased by more than 300 percent, from 2,187 homes in 1963 to 8,915 in 2013. Who is paying for the costs of defending structures built in vulnerable places? The public. Sprawl is wreaking havoc on the budgets of some counties struggling to pay for law enforcement, fire protection, emergency services, roads and their maintenance, planning staff, and transportation for such things as school buses.

In the next 10 years, nearly 150 square miles of currently undeveloped private land on the west side of Greater Yellowstone is forecasted to experience low-density creeping “exurban” development.

“Teton Valley, Idaho will not only be challenged by growth pressure, but also by correcting the mistakes of the past,” Hill said. “When it comes to managing growth, the Teton Valley community is often characterized by its divisions, but the vast majority of its residents want to protect its quiet, rural atmosphere. My biggest fear is that we’ll make the same mistakes again because we’ve lost sight of why we all choose to live here.”

If county commissioners in Greater Yellowstone aren’t together addressing the costs and impacts of growth extending beyond their jurisdictional boundaries, and federal and state agencies aren’t unified in addressing impacts on and beyond their public land boundaries, what are the options?

“There is a prevailing mentality that we as a region can deal with challenges the same way we handled them 20 to 30 years ago, and it’s incredibly shortsighted,” Carpenter says. “There is nothing preventing us from being smarter. It’s really a test of whether our leaders have the will and the courage to show they are capable of consciously avoiding the destructive patterns that have wrecked other places. Of course, it really comes down to the quality of the people citizens elect.”

As Bozeman/Gallatin races toward becoming Minneapolis and the valleys straddling the Tetons turn first into Bozeman and then Salt Lake City, Carpenter says it is recent events elsewhere that keep him up at night.

Greater Yellowstone does not exist in isolation from what’s happening in the rest of the world and that is the frightening wildcard. “This is what’s been haunting me,” Carpenter says. “I worry about the deepening impacts climate change not just in the region with water and wildfires, but how events from afar impact us. Will hardship elsewhere drive significant numbers of people here?”

Scientists have been discussing the consequences of an ice shelf the size of Delaware breaking off Antarctica, melting and raising sea levels a foot along coastal areas where half of the population in the U.S. presently lives, he said.

“And then you look at Houston and Hurricane Harvey and Florida and Hurricane Irma, and Phoenix broiling in 120-degree heat, the water shortages coming to cities in the desert Southwest, and the fires in southern California,” Carpenter says from the slope of the Bridgers. “The current explosive growth in Greater Yellowstone is happening because the region is attracting a lot of people coming here with a lot of money wanting to live quieter lives closer to nature. They are the first big wave.”

That alone, he says, is creating a nightmare of cascading growth-related issues, to which leadership in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is either unable, unwilling or ill-equipped to confront.

“But how are the counties and towns going to handle a potential flood of climate refugees on top of the current inundation?” Carpenter asks. He doesn’t even need to speak the answer.

The Vatican’s representative to the United Nations said “corruption, protracted conflicts and other man-made disasters” are the cause of entrenched poverty in the developing world, not a “healthy, growing population.” He also called on the world body to “respect life” when it comes to giving international aid.

ROME – Talk of an “impending population bomb,” the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations said on Wednesday, has led to sometimes “draconian” policies, which ignore the complex nature of population growth.

Filipino Archbishop Bernardito Auza, speaking to the UN’s Commission on Population and Development, said “differing regional and even country specific situations” need to be taken into account when speaking about demographic changes.

Auza noted that populations are growing in some countries, while stabilizing in others, but pointed out some countries are experiencing a “spiraling demographic decline.”

Auza’s reference to a “population bomb” is a reference to the 1968 book of the same title written by Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich, who predicted that by the 1980s mass starvation and other consequences of food shortages caused by overpopulation would lead to social upheavals across the world.

Despite the inaccuracy of his forecasts, Ehrlich still supports the central thesis of his work: Massive government population control measures, including artificial birth control and abortion, are needed to protect the planet’s future.

Auza said the idea of a “population bomb” has led certain governments to adopt policies that encourage population control measures as the easiest response to the fear of resource scarcity and underdevelopment, adding that some of these policies are “draconian.”

The archbishop, while not naming Ehrlich in his address, countered his arguments by saying “demographic growth is fully compatible with shared prosperity.”

Auza said while “responsible parenthood and sexual behavior are always moral imperatives,” the use of “coercive regulation of fertility” undermines freedom and responsibility.

“Respect for life from the moment of conception to natural death, even in the face of the great challenge of birth, must always inform policies, especially when it comes to international aid, which should be made available according to the real priorities of the receiving nation, and not by an imposed will of the donor,” he said.

Auza also pointed out the trend to lower birth rates in the developed world began “before it had access to modern methods of contraception.

“It occurred with economic and technological advancement, as well as investments in education, infrastructure and institutions,” – Auza said – “It is well known that economic growth corresponds with lower fertility rates and, when accompanied by investment in education and health, increases productivity and the well-being of societies.”

The Vatican diplomat also said it was not a “healthy, growing population” which is causing entrenched poverty, but “corruption, protracted conflicts and other man-made disasters.”

Auza’s statement came just a month after Ehrlich’s appearance at the February 27 – March 1 Vatican conference titled “Biological extinction: How to save the natural world on which we depend.”

Despite his participation, the “final declaration” of the meeting stated increasing threats against biodiversity, unsustainable use of the earth’s resources, and accelerated extinction rates “are driven more by over-consumption and unjust wealth distribution than by the number of people on the planet.”

Mohsen Samir Mohammed never wanted more than four kids, but as his cousins and brothers living down the block in Ezbet Khairallah, one of Cairo’s poorest and most densely populated districts, welcomed son after son—and even insulted his manhood—the amiable 35-year-old started to wonder: Did he have enough children? Annoyed by their taunts, he persuaded his wife to go off birth control. Over the next four years, they added a fifth, sixth and seventh new member of the family.

Sitting in the unlit stairwell of his building, Mohammed now has regrets. His meager salary from a factory that makes steel shutters is barely enough to feed his family, which subsists on stewed fava beans and bread. With no means of affording even the 15-cent bus rides to school, his children don’t attend. But in a country where large households have long been the norm, Mohammed says he felt powerless to buck the trend. “My father had many, many children, my grandfather had many, many children, and everyone here has many children,” he says. “It’s not easy to do something different.”

Not easy at all. Egypt’s population is multiplying fast. From a little over 66 million at the turn of the century, it hit almost 93 million earlier this year. If current birth rates hold, demographers project that the country’s total will be 150 million by 2050.

That kind of growth would be a challenge for almost any state, but for Egypt, politically fragile after three regime changes in six years and in the throes of food and water shortages, this population boom threatens to undermine the country’s already fragile stability. “It even constitutes a threat to national security,” says Amal Fouad, director of social research studies at CAPMAS, the state statistics-gathering body.

Nowhere is Egypt’s struggle with food more evident than in the country’s trade and supply ministries. Egypt is already the world’s largest wheat importer, and as the country’s population grows, it’s going to have to import more and more food, which it often subsidizes. That’s expensive, and it comes as the populous Nile-side cities, like Assiut and Sohag, are eating up more and more precious farmland. So both the authorities and the country’s beleaguered farmers feel they’ve been saddled with an impossible task. “More food for more people on less land,” says Bashir Abdullah, a farmer and labor organizer in Giza, who’s been fighting developers’ encroachment on local fields for a decade. “It’s like they think we’re miracle workers.”

The surge in demand is affecting Egypt’s great river too. With each person using about 160,000 gallons of water per year—98 percent of which is drawn from the Nile—Egypt has been short on water for a decade. But by 2030, when the population is forecast to be near 120 million, that figure will have dropped below 130,000 gallons. At a time when dam construction in Ethiopia threatens to cut the river’s flow—at least temporarily—the lifeblood of the pharaohs might soon be reduced to a pitiful dribble.

Severe food and water shortages could lead to bread riots or other kinds of civil unrest, which worries the country’s security services. The revolution of 2011 was sparked, in part, by the economy’s inability to cope with the hundreds of thousands of young men entering the workforce each year. Now, with economic growth rates even weaker, and the education system still among the worst in the region, it’s no wonder some officials fear Egypt’s population growth. It’s “worse than terrorism,” Abu Bakr al-Gendy, the general in charge of CAPMAS, told a Cairo newspaper in December. Analysts suggest President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has almost come to fear millennials.

What’s doubly frustrating for family-planning advocates: The boom was preventable. Until recently, Egyptian authorities appeared to have a strong population control strategy. From a high of over 3.5 percent in the 1970s, growth rates fell to 1.7 percent in the early 2000s. Through a wall-to-wall awareness campaign over several decades, which included billboards in poor rural areas and an expansion in access to contraception, analysts say Egypt appeared close to resolving its growth problem.

But starting in 2008 and 2009, three years before the uprising that unseated Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s longtime president, the government tried something different. Perhaps complacent after earlier success, Cairo officials eased their support for various family-planning initiatives. At the same time, international nongovernmental organizations reeled in their spending, believing they could better deploy those resources elsewhere. Shortly before the 2011 revolution, the growth rate ticked up to 2.23 percent. After the overthrow of the regime, that figure leapt to 2.48 percent in 2011-12. And there was a notable spike in November 2011, exactly nine months after Mubarak’s toppling.

Some say Egypt’s post–Arab Spring baby boom wasn’t coincidental: The country’s most dramatic year-on-year population surge came during the Muslim Brotherhood’s period in power. Right after President Mohammed Morsi’s time in office, the annual growth rate peaked at 2.55 percent, with births in the Brotherhood’s southern strongholds returning to heights unseen since the 1980s. Islamist lawmakers tabled legislation that would have lowered the legal age of marriage from 18 to 13, increasing the likelihood that women—or, in some cases, girls—would have babies sooner and thereby undermining a key plank of global population control. Given the Brotherhood’s history of refusing to stock contraceptives in the vast network of clinics it once operated, it’s not unsurprising the group’s cadres displayed little interest in resurrecting the birth control media campaigns that had lapsed around the revolution.

Customers hold out subsidy cards as they buy fresh bread on December 15, 2016 in Cairo, Egypt. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s popularity dropped significantly after months of protests against rising fuel and food prices, calls for mass anti-government demonstrations and the continued terror attacks.CHRIS MCGRATH/GETTY

Family-planning advocates are also frustrated by how Sissi, Morsi’s successor, has handled the country’s population growth. Fixated on security threats real and perceived, the ex-general’s government has pushed a raft of anti-NGO laws, which have driven away many foreign organizations, including family-planning providers. In 1995, NGOs supplied 10 percent of all contraceptives in Egypt, but by last year that fell to 0.6 percent.

A half-decade of chaos and disjointed policies are not easily undone. Between 2009 and 2014, the number of children young Egyptians deem desirable for a family increased from an average of 2.5 to 3, according to Population Council studies. Contraceptive availability dropped—to 58 percent of the population, several percentage points below the pre-revolutionary average.

Despite officials’ warnings, Egypt’s large population doesn’t need to be a burden, demographers maintain. If the young were properly educated, they say, this enormous cohort of 20-something men and women could easily become a nation-building boon, boosting the economy, much like China’s youth bulge. Sissi and his senior generals have an impressive array of resources at their disposal, like gold, gas and fertile riverside land. But critics say they’ve mismanaged them, which has compounded the shortages stemming from the country’s growing population.

After decades of dictators governing in a shortsighted fashion, much of the damage has already been done. From the enormous desert cement factories, built to cater to the building boom, to the ballooning outer districts of the capital that now almost surround the pyramid complex of Giza, soaring population numbers continue to reshape the country.

To Mohsen Samir Mohammed, it seems inconceivable that his corner of Cairo might accommodate even one more person. “There are new people here, new people there,” he says. “Everywhere there are people, people, people. Where are we going to put them?”

From the 1996 book, Betrayal of Science and Reason, by Paul R. Ehrlich and Ann H. Ehrlich:

“The choice is between permitting the continued depletion of America’s vital natural capital and making an all-out effort to save it. Science tells us that America’s population cannot keep expanding perpetually, always demanding more and more from the nation’s finite living and non-living resources. The Endangered Species Act at the very least acknowledges the preservation of living resources as a high priority, which was a historical first. By attempting to shield those resources from the piecemeal destruction that is ensured when each species is measured against some perceived immediate economic gain, it helps set the United States on a path toward sustainability.”

….

“Our massive tampering with the world’s interdependant web of life—coupled with the environmental damage inflicted by deforestation, species loss, and climate change–could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly understand.

“Uncertainty over the extents of these effects cannot excuse complacency or delay in facing threats.

POPULATION

“The earth is finite. It’s ability to absorb waste and destructive affluent is finite. It’s ability to provide food and energy is finite. It’s ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth’s limits. Current economic practices that damage the environment, in both developed and underdeveloped nations, cannot be continued without the risk that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair.

“Pressures resulting from unrestrained population put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. If we are to halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth. A World Bank estimate indicates that world population will not stabalize at less than 12.4 billion, while the United Nations concludes that the eventual total could reach 14 billion, a near tripling of today’s 5.4 billion. But, even at this moment, one person in five lives in absolute poverty without enough to eat, and one in ten suffers serious malnutrition.

“No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanitty immeasurably diminish.

WARNING

“We the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humaity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”

Under the five things we must do, Ehrlich cites, “We must bring environmentally damaging activities under control to restore and protect the integrity of the earth’s systems we depend on. We must, for example, move away from fossil fuels to more benign, inexhaustable energy sources to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution of our air and water. … We must halt deforestation, injury to and loss of agricultural land, and the loss of terrestrial and marine plant and animal species.” …

I’m casting my vote against Donald Trump. There are countless reasons why, not least of which is that his sons are trophy hunters, responsibe for the deaths of elephants, leopards and untold other African animals.

But, ‘they are not him,’ you might say. No, and George W was not George Bush, Sr. But W would never have been eletected (or even thought of running) if his father wasn’t first. One sport hunter in the upper echelons of government is bad enough (and we already have one in speaker of the house Paul Ryan).

That doesn’t mean Hillary is the perfect choice either, though. Back when she rejected overpopulation as an issue by telling China (as Secretary of State) that their one-child policy was was wrong, I swore I’d never vote for her if she ran for office in the future. (At least her husband and daughter are veg.)

But Trump is clearly the wrong choice, with his statement that he “believes” climate change is a “hoax” and his selection of a fellow denialist for his cabinet.

I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about god, the easter bunny, or bigfoot; climate change is a well-documented, well-proven fact, and the most urgent issue of our time.

Excerpt from the 2005 book, The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, by Tim Flannery:

“The twentieth century opened on a world that was home to little more than a billion people and closed on a world of 6 billion, and every one of those 6 billion is using on average four times as much energy as their forefathers did 100 years before. This helps account for the fact that the burning of fossil fuels has increased sixteenfold over that period…

“In 1961 there was still room to maneuver. In that seemingly distant age there were just 3 billion people and they were all using only half of the total resources that our global ecosystem could sustainably provide. A short twenty-five years later, in 1986, we had reached a watershed, for that year our population topped 5 billion, and such was our collective thirst for resources that we were using all of Earth’s sustainable production.

“In effect, 1986 marks the year that humans reached Earth’s carrying capacity, and ever since we have been running the equivalent of a deficit budget, which is sustained only by plundering our capital base. The plundering takes the form of overexploiting fisheries, overgrazing pasture until it becomes desert, destroying forests, and polluting our oceans and atmosphere, which in turn leads to the large number of environmental issues we face. In the end, though, the environmental budget is the only one that really counts.

“By 2001 humanity’s deficit had ballooned to 20%, and our population to over 6 billion. By 2050, when the population is expected to level out around 9 billion, the burden of human existence will be such that we will be using–if they can still be found–nearly two planets’ worth of resources. But for all the difficulty we’ll experience in finding those resources, it’s our waste–particularly the greenhouse gases–that is the limiting factor.”

Whenever any animal population gets out of control, whether it be an overrun of deer or geese, humans usually step in and make plans to curb it through hunting or damaging nests. It seems cruel, but without natural predators to bring the population down, overpopulation could have devastating effects on the local environment. Yet, humans have shown themselves to be far more destructive than any other animal on this planet, so why don’t we offer ourselves the same consideration? I’m talking about anti-natalism here, the philosophical position that opposes procreation.

“If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence,” writes philosopher David Benatar.

There’s a fair argument to be made for anti-natalism that tears at most people’s desire to reproduce and a moral responsibility that few of us consider. This planet is overpopulated and we’re consuming more resources than the Earth can reproduce. You may not know this, but last week featured Earth Overshoot Day — the day when the Global Footprint Network announced that we’ve consumed a year’s worth of resources. The GFN estimates that the first Overshoot Day may have been back in the 1970s “due to the growth in the global population alongside the expansion of consumption around the world,” wrote Emma Howard from The Guardian.

“If that level of destruction were caused by another species, we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence,” writes philosopher David Benatar, author of the anti-natalist book, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.

“Nothing is lost by never coming into existence. By contrast, ceasing to exist does have costs.”

We’re in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction crisis. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that 30,000 species per year (or three species per hour) are being driven to extinction. Compare this to the natural background rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history.

The current mass extinction differs from all others in being driven by a single species rather than a planetary or galactic physical process. When the human race — Homo sapiens sapiens — migrated out of Africa to the Middle East 90,000 years ago, to Europe and Australia 40,000 years ago, to North America 12,500 years ago, and to the Caribbean 8,000 years ago, waves of extinction soon followed. The colonization-followed-by-extinction pattern can be seen as recently as 2,000 years ago, when humans colonized Madagascar and quickly drove elephant birds, hippos, and large lemurs extinct [1].

The first wave of extinctions targeted large vertebrates hunted by hunter-gatherers. The second, larger wave began 10,000 years ago as the discovery of agriculture caused a population boom and a need to plow wildlife habitats, divert streams, and maintain large herds of domestic cattle. The third and largest wave began in 1800 with the harnessing of fossil fuels. With enormous, cheap energy at its disposal, the human population grew rapidly from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1930, 4 billion in 1975, and over 7 billion today. If the current course is not altered, we’ll reach 8 billion by 2020 and 9 to 15 billion (likely the former) by 2050.

No population of a large vertebrate animal in the history of the planet has grown that much, that fast, or with such devastating consequences to its fellow earthlings. Humans’ impact has been so profound that scientists have proposed that the Holocene era be declared over and the current epoch (beginning in about 1900) be called the Anthropocene: the age when the “global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development” dominate planetary physical, chemical, and biological conditions [2].

Forty percent of the planet’s land is devoted to human food production, up from 7 percent in 1700 [3].

Fifty percent of the planet’s land mass has been transformed for human use [3].

More atmospheric nitrogen is now fixed by humans that all other natural processes combined [3].

The authors of Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems, including the current director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, concluded:

“[A]ll of these seemingly disparate phenomena trace to a single cause: the growing scale of the human enterprise. The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occurring now are fundamentally different from those at any other time in history. . . . We live on a human-dominated planet and the momentum of human population growth, together with the imperative for further economic development in most
of the world, ensures that our dominance will increase.”

Predicting local extinction rates is complex due to differences in biological diversity, species distribution, climate, vegetation, habitat threats, invasive species, consumption patterns, and enacted conservation measures. One constant, however, is human population pressure. A study of 114 nations found that human population density predicted with 88-percent accuracy the number of endangered birds and mammals as identified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature [4]. Current population growth trends indicate that the number of threatened species will increase by 7 percent over the next 20 years and 14 percent by 2050. And that’s without the addition of global warming impacts.

When the population of a species grows beyond the capacity of its environment to sustain it, it reduces that capacity below the original level, ensuring an eventual population crash.

“The density of people is a key factor in species threats,” said Jeffrey McKee, one of the study’s authors. “If other species follow the same pattern as the mammals and birds… we are facing a serious threat to global biodiversity associated with our growing human population.” [5].

So where does wildlife stand today in relation to 7 billion people? Worldwide, 12 percent of mammals, 12 percent of birds, 31 percent of reptiles, 30 percent of amphibians, and 37 percent of fish are threatened with extinction [6]. Not enough plants and invertebrates have been assessed to determine their global threat level, but it is severe.

Extinction is the most serious, utterly irreversible effect of unsustainable human population. But unfortunately, many analyses of what a sustainable human population level would look like presume that the goal is simply to keep the human race at a level where it has enough food and clean water to survive. Our notion of sustainability and ecological footprint — indeed, our notion of world worth living in — presumes that humans will allow for, and themselves enjoy, enough room and resources for all species to live.